Paying for moderation/upvotes sounds like a terrible idea to me, it basically turn all posts into "promoted posts". If the platform becomes successful what will prevent companies and lobbyists from paying to have their content at the top, always? This is already a problem with popular platforms like reddit (and to a lesser extent HN) where this is actually considered inappropriate and against the rules, I'm not sure it's a great idea to embrace it.

Being able to "tip" the content creator to reward their work is good however, but it's not particularly novel.

>forgot to mention that if you upvote content, later upvotes of the same content earn you money.

Now I can't imagine how anybody could think that's a good idea. It incentivizes you upvote not content that you deem interesting but content that you think other will find interesting. In other words the website pays you to play into the hivemind.

Imagine reddit (which already has huge hivemind and low quality content issues on big subreddits) if you rewarded people for upvoting popular content and punishing them for upvoting more unusual posts that might not fare as good. Sounds like a terrible idea to me. See a funny cat gif being posted? Quickly upvote it to reap an easy reward. See a post about a very interesting but complex essay on the geopolitics of Botswana ? Better not risk and and lose some money.

> If the platform becomes successful what will prevent companies and lobbyists from paying to have their content at the top, always?

The cost?

Let's assume their content is essentially an ad that has no value to anyone on the platform. To get to the top, they'll need to outpay a whole community of people who are incentivized to upvote more interesting content.

Not more interesting, more popular. There's a huge difference. Look at the frontpage of reddit or youtube if you don't believe me.

Besides how much money would the average user be willing to spend daily on such a website? $1? $2? That already seems like a lot to me. Compared to the amount of money being poured into advertising or politics I don't see how the balance could hold. Besides couldn't you recoup a lot of your investment in a voting ring if later upvotes partially pay for earlier ones? Especially due to the positive feedback that popular posts are more visible and therefore tend to become even more popular? And even more so if people are incentivized to vote on quickly rising posts in the hope to make money?

From a game theory standpoint it doesn't seem workable at all to me, at least if your objective is to promote insightful and interesting content over memes and pictures of naked ladies.

I find it an interesting concept, but as with so many of these solutions I don't really see why you have to have Bitcoin Cash to make it work. They could charge your credit card for upvotes and pay you in fiat like Patreon does, and the functionality will be exactly the same from the end user's perspective.

I think it boils down to payment processing fees. For patreon for example it would be super inconvenient (and expensive) to process all payments individually, so payments are made in bulk. This is why monthly payments are the standard.

With crypto you can perform instant sub $1 payments with minimal fees (blocks aren't full so it's super low atm). It also saves not having to handle chargebacks, fraud, etc.

If you need your credit card, then you can be censored. That's why it uses Bitcoin (BCH) instead.